How dedicated trio resurrected Warwickshire CCC museum in old offices

DID you hear the one about the three blokes who set up a cricket museum?

DID you hear the one about the three blokes who set up a cricket museum?

In the space of 30 days. On a budget of £150.

And we’re not talking about a modest, old, thrown-together cricket museum with two bats, an old photo and a stained jockstrap. What’s involved here is the transformation of a derelict space into an attractive, intelligently laid-out, compelling collection of memorabilia which includes many fascinating and important exhibits.

Have you heard that one? Well, it’s not a joke.

That is exactly what has occurred at Edgbaston this winter. And the product of the labour of these three chaps is a brand new Warwickshire County Cricket Club museum which will be open for the new season and no doubt benefit visitors to the ground for many years to come.

Step forward and take a bow: Phil Britt, John Oates and Chris Smith. Not that any of them would want to take a bow. They are not that type.

They have just quietly knuckled down on a project which invoked their passion for cricket and cricket history and went about the business of providing one of England’s major Test venues with a dimension it has been missing since the original museum closed when the old Edgbaston pavilion was demolished.

And perhaps most significantly of all, they saved one of the biggest collections of cricketana in the country from the prospect of remaining unseen, boxed up and perhaps eventually even broken up.

The £32 million Pavilion End development which opened at Edgbaston last year contains a new purpose-built Visitors Centre. An ‘interactive’ area, it was never intended to be a typical “old-fashioned” museum and it certainly isn’t one. Visitors get a fleeting and superficial glimpse of Warwickshire’s rich history. Few linger long because there is not too much to see.

The designers followed a brief to make the centre modern, airy and uncluttered. Some interesting exhibits lurk in there but they have an awful lot of space in which to breathe. Like other products of the “Master Plan” - the dressing room areas and media centre, for example - the Visitors Centre is simply far too big.

The irony being that, while all that space was wasted, elsewhere on the Edgbaston site, boxes and boxes of memorabilia waited for...well..what?

Phil Britt, the museum curator, wasn’t happy about that so he spoke to chief executive Colin Povey.

“The Visitors Centre is fine,” said Phil. “But there were rumblings from members that they also wanted a traditional cricket museum on the ground. It did seem an awful waste to have all this wonderful stuff in storage away from public view.

“It was only going to deteriorate and, in the end, we would probably have had to simply send things back to people who had kindly donated them. That was the last thing we wanted.

“So in October I spoke to Colin who is very committed to preserving the heritage of the club. We had a walk round the ground and identified two or three locations which might work.

In the end we decided on the old catering and admin offices beneath the RES Wyatt Stand. Colin gave us the space and said ‘get cracking’ and that’s what we have done.”

That’s where the other two chaps came in. John Oates first visited Edgbaston in 1935, taken down by his dad at the start of a lifelong love of cricket.

Once a highly accomplished wicketkeeper for Sparkbrook Amateurs, now aged 81, he still watches Warwickshire regularly home and away and, when he heard about Phil’s work, quickly offered to help. His input has been huge as a big, dusty forgotten room was cleaned, tidied and reinvented.

Then Northfield-based cricket-lover and historian Chris Smith got involved. He read about the project in the Birmingham Mail and was quick to get in touch. Chris’s input, not least in arranging a superb, comprehensive display of team photos from the 1890s to the present day, has been “absolutely invaluable,” insists Phil.

Two mornings a week, the trio got busy. First objective: Make the place presentable. Second objective: Make it into a museum and library.

“The two guys have been absolutely great,” Phil said. “We have been coming in on Monday and Tuesday for a couple of months so that’s not a lot of hours really but we are almost there now and it will be open for the new season.

“We have brought out everything that was in storage, including all the books because the best thing about this spaceis that we can house the library in its own separate room within the museum. Having the library integrated into the museum is ideal.”

Visitors will find much to enjoy among the plethora of pictures, trophies, bats and many of the quirkier type of offering that no anodyne Visitors Centre will offer. The helmet which Andy Lloyd wore during his famously fleeting Test career. The original Edgbaston pavilion clock and bell. A commemorative plate for Dennis Amiss’s 100 100s.

And loads more. What’s that hanging up there? Three blazers?

The resourcefulness of our three wise men knows no bounds. Working on a rather limited budget, when they came across an old, discarded coatstand, they quickly made the bottom section into a bat-rack and the top bit into a device from which now hang the blazers of Bert Wolton, Cryil Goodway and Fulford Brown.

That budget? Well, costs have come in around £150 (the main expense: screws). Not bad for a museum/library which will keep visitors hooked for hours whereas the Visitors Centre, having cost well in excess of £250,000, detains few customers for more than a few minutes.

Perhaps ‘Britt, Smith and Oates Ltd” should have been put in charge of the Master Plan...